September 11th: Ten Years, with Dexter Filkins

I headed straight for Ground Zero. It took me most of the day to get there: a few hours to find a police officer nice enough to allow me to ride one of the ferries over (all the bridges and tunnels were closed), and then a couple of more hours to walk downtown and slip past all the checkpoints. I got to One Liberty Plaza, just across the street from the fire, as night fell. I wrote about that day in my book, “The Forever War.”

3. Are there places you’ve gone, or people you’ve met, that you wouldn’t have if not for 9/11? Are you different than you might have been?

The attacks changed my life. Within a couple weeks of 9/11, I was in northern Afghanistan, sleeping in a mud hut with my friend and colleague, James Hill, in a village called Khoja Bawahuddin. I watched the first B-52 strikes hit the Taliban lines. A few weeks later, I saw the Taliban collapse. I went in and out of Afghanistan for much of the next year, and then, along with so much of America’s resources, I moved on to Iraq, where I stayed until 2006. I went back again to Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2008. I’ve seen several lifetimes’ worth of drama and tumult and change, and met a lot of extraordinary people along the way.

4. Is New York a different city for you now?

New York is still a pretty magical place. But it’s always struck me as a lucky place, too. For all the suffering of that day, none of it compared, at least in magnitude, to what unfolded in the wars I saw.

5. Is there one image or scene that evokes that day for you?

The image I still remember is from Ground Zero the first day: I was standing in what had been a traffic intersection, except all the buildings were gone. The ruins of the World Trade Center burned and belched a few feet away. And there in the street, spread out across the watery rubble, was a human intestine.

6. What piece of work to emerge from 9/11 by another writer (or photographer, filmmaker, or artist) has stayed with you the most?

My colleague, Larry Wright, wrote “The Looming Tower,” a sweeping and stunning history of Al Qaeda and 9/11. It’s the best work in any genre on the subject, utterly fantastic.